Stones of Aran (40 page)

Can the foregoing account, compiled from variously remote texts, be appropriated into the immediacy of this book? My principle has been to find among the stones of Aran the touchstone of
admissibility
appropriate to each sort of material; here I must search among the stones of Arkin Castle.

Many of these stones are missing. The landward walls, especially
to the south and west, have been nibbled away by the teeming
cottages
that invaded the castle yard in the last century. The cottages themselves have gone now, or have declined into sheds and barns for the one or two more recent dwellings that constitute a part of Cill Éinne still known as An Bábhún, the bawn or courtyard.

On the east the roadside wall incorporates some rags of ancient masonry, while on the north along the shoreline forty yards or so of curtain wall still stands tall, looming over the back gardens of the houses. At the north-east angle is a small, square, parapeted tower, standing forward of the rest on a natural bastion of rock over the shore. These fragments are known as Ballaí Chromaill, Cromwell's walls, after the man whose ogre memory has gobbled up all history but his own.

From landward, glimpsed between the houses, the sea-defences appear as an abnormally high back-garden wall. Shadowy outlines on the masonry indicate the cottages once built against it. Towards the east is a row of six small musket loops, horizontal
rectangular
openings splayed both within and without to give a wider field of fire. In summer potato stalks reach up towards their sills. To view the wall from the other side one can scramble down the little cliff around the foot of the tower, if the tide is out, onto the flat rock-sheets of the shore under the castle's dank frontage. Among the boulders littering this shore, low water reveals one with a mediaeval, ecclesiastical look, a five-foot length of pillar with a square base and octagonal shaft; I gather that it probably came from an archway in the east wall, now blocked by a shed, through which the road used to enter An Bábhún. The sea-wall appears to rise directly from the shore, but in fact its first ten feet must be merely a cladding of the cliff; above that it rises another eighteen or twenty feet. Towards its western end there is a
round-headed
arch at sea level which gave access by steps up a tunnel or a cranny of the cliff to the courtyard within. Above the archway is one of those projecting structures called machicolations, like a balcony on two stout corbels with an open floor through which discouragement could be rained on unwelcome callers below.
Nowadays the repellant substances come sluicing down through the archway itself, which has been half walled up and converted into a drain for some disused pigsties above, and still serves as a rubbish chute; I had to jump back smartly to avoid a nasty
soaking
once when investigating the defences.

Cycling through Cill Éinne one autumn day, I caught an
antique
sight here that seemed to close up the whole history of the castle like a book not worth reading. Perched high on the ragged skyline of the great wall an old man was threshing rye, whipping each fistful of stems down across a wooden bench so that the grain fell onto a spread sheet and the chaff went glimmering downwind. History and harvest are antitheses, the chaff seemed to say, and the elders of Cill Éinne might agree. Certainly for them the stories of those vanished cottages shadowed forth by the castle wall and their magical inhabitants of not-so-long-ago out-talk the centuries of the history books. Here, says garrulous old tradition, lived a man who had a pet seal. Every day it went down to the sea through the arch. If the man was fishing on the Glasson Rocks he would see it swimming out of the Sound, going south. One night it came home with a spear in its back, and it died. The spear was put up on the rafters, and a long time afterwards a visitor to the house recognized it as his; he was a bailiff from the salmon
fisheries
at Foynes on the Shannon. And here lived two brothers who could recite the alphabet backwards as fast as anyone else could forward. They were weather-glasses too; they had the gift from their grandmother, Nell-an-Tower. But if we let tradition start on tales of Nell-an-Tower we'll be here for chapters. She was a
bean
feasa,
a woman of knowledge. Once she was attending a woman in childbirth in Gort na gCapall when a man came to fetch her to his wife in Iaráirne. He offered to take her behind him on his horse but she said, “Let you be going on ahead now, and I'll follow.” So off he went on his horse, but when he reached the Carcair Mhór in Cill Éinne he saw her going up it before him! Of course, he'd come past all the pubs and shebeens, and perhaps he'd stopped for a souse of
poitín.
But you wouldn't know; there's a lot of stories
about her travelling fast like that. She knew about herbs too. They say she could take a disease of a person and put it on a beast, or another person. Once she was picking the herb to cure someone and she happened to look out to sea. There was a currach there, and the man in it died. She was very sorry about that, but she couldn't help it. The castle used to have a round tower—it's gone long ago—and her cottage was built against it; that's why she was called Nell-an-Tower. Once she was going by some men making a coffin and she said…. And in that little boreen east of the houses—it's still called Bóithrín an Bhábhúin—a lad made a very smart reply to the priest, at the time of the Saucepans. But the Saucepans is another chapter too…

Wall-rue, wall-pepper, wall-pennywort, pellitory-of-the-wall; the old wall, backdrop of these tales, has itself abandoned
chronology
to vegetate in perennial recurrency. The rusty-backed fern likes its ancient mortar, escaped veronica bushes have taken to it, and high up on it grow tree-mallows, as on the real cliffs. The wall has become the stony, untilled margin of the plots at its foot. But then, as one's eye browses over this crannied acreage, a shadowy form, a slight depression in a smoother stone, comes suddenly into focus: a Latin cross carved on the lintel of the easternmost musket loop. A church was pulled down to build a fort! And if that is true, so is the rest: the O'Briens were defeated by the O'Flahertys, the Lynches foreclosed on the mortgage, the thirteen hundred foot-soldiers of the Puritan army came with their battering piece, the drums beat for the surrendering Irish, the priests starved on twopence a day. The whole story from St. Enda's angel with his blazing knife down to the embezzled bedding of good Queen Anne's neglectful reign, all happened, all is attested to by this cross. And now, being reasonably persuaded of its
authenticity
, I can append my clerkly note: History, unlettered thresher, its mark.

The word
maoil
in Irish means among other things a hillock with a flattish top; it is cognate with dozens of others denoting things blunt, bald, roofless, or low-topped in some way. The eastern end of Cill Éinne, beyond the harbour, is An Maoilín, the small flat height. Elderly folk taking the sun on a strip of waste land
between
the road and the sea, opposite the line of cottages, have a fifteen-foot cliff at their heels, and below it a shallow annex of Cill Éinne bay called Poll na dTarbh, the inlet of the bulls. Beyond that expands a blonde low-land of sandy beaches, pasturage
almost
as sandy, and dunes crested with marram grass: An Rinn Mhéith, the fertile point. Here our local airline, Aer Árann, has its little terminal building and its crossed runways marked out on the grass by lines of white-painted tyres. The comings and goings of its Islander aircraft give the old fellows on the
maoilín,
and myself when I join them there, something not over-exciting to comment upon, with long intervals of silent contemplation. An arrival is
announced
by a faint buzzing in the north-eastern sector of the huge sky around the airport, and soon a little cream-coloured fleck
appears
between two puffs of cumulus. Is she going to one of the other islands first? Yes, she sags away in the direction of Inis Meáin and disappears; silence rejoins us, relaxing its limbs on the
maoilín.
Now she's revving up again over there, now she's taking off—and here she is already, skimming in over the great oval strand to the east, touching down with a bounce as soon as her wheels have cleared the rocks of the shore, as if there were not twice as much runway as she needs in the width of the headland. She slows almost to a halt, turns, and trundles back towards us. A brisk
figure
emerges from the terminal to meet her: Colie Hernon; we know him well, his horizon-blue eyes, his jaw of officer-material, his backbone straight as a flag-staff. As soon as the propellers are stilled he ducks under the high wings, opens up the pregnant-cow bulk of the fuselage, and with the brusqueness of a vet delivers the nine passengers, their suitcases and the bundle of today's
newspapers onto the soil of Aran. His is the first, and quite
untypical
, face of the Man of Aran these visitors see. (An Inis Meáin man once said to me, as to a kindred spirit, “If you or me was walking down the road now, and we saw some strangers coming up, we might turn aside into the boreen so as not to have to meet them. But not Colie! He'd just go marching ahead!”) And for years Colm Ó hIarnáin, to give him the Irish form of his name, has been the island's grizzled interface with the outside and official world. In his younger days, we on the
maoilín
can remember, he was cox of the lifeboat, and then he was a prime mover of the
co-operative
set up to bring electricity to our houses.

The history of Aer Árann is said to begin with his letter to
The
Irish
Press
in 1969, stating the islands' need for an air link with the mainland to prevent their further depopulation. Some Galway businessmen scented a proposition, and Aer Árann came into
being
the following year. Its periods of growth and recession since then, profits and losses, grants from the Gaeltacht authority to subsidize islanders' tickets, its services, proposed, inaugurated or abandoned, to Shannon, Dublin, London, its charter flights to Britain or Europe, are all beyond the horizon, as seen from An Maoilín. We hear that ferrying businessmen to Hamburg and such places is now the most lucrative of its operations, and we feel vaguely aggrieved, no longer having the delusion of earlier years that we own an airline. But Colie is still here as a guarantor of Aer Árann's continued commitment to the islands. And his son Michael is a familiar component of the scene, driving the minibus that distributes and collects Aer Árann passengers up and down the island. In the old days Michael used to have to chase the
donkeys
off the airstrip before the first flight of each morning; now An Rinn Mhéith is fenced and gated, and rabbit-holes are the only obstacles to a smooth landing. Michael has a fund of Aran lore at the service of visitors, on the stone walls for example, which I hear him say would stretch from here to Boston; and if he overhears me talking to the person next to me in the bus and
imparting
some scrap that could be added to his repertoire he will
have a word with me afterwards: “What was that about the angel with the blazing knife? That would be something new to tell the Yanks!”

Among the pilots we oldsters know only the first of them, Bill Wallace, and entrust ourselves to any of his successors with a twinge of misgiving. “We'll be all right with Bill Wallace,” I once heard a slightly drunken voice behind me in the plane intoning repetitively: “We'll be all right with Bill. He used to bring bombers back from over Germany on one engine; that's flying for you! We'll be all right with Bill.” Bill Wallace's feeling for the
island
is probably unspoken, but to me his relaxed and joyous flying expressed that first delighted discovery of Aran from the air, a
maoilín
set in the giant interference patterns of Atlantic rollers coming through the various sea-ways. At the hint of a wish Bill would tilt the whole island up for us so that we could look more closely at our own rooftop and into our backyard. But those days of caressing Aran's outlines with our wingtips in impromptu
circuitings
are gone; the oil crisis made us mindful of how much it costs per minute to keep the plane in the air. Bill Wallace has
retired
(though he often comes back to fish from the Glasson Rocks and drink in Fitz's), and now we have to learn the names of young, smartly uniformed pilots, who weigh us and our baggage before each flight and allot us seats after a computation of balances, who look tense about the nape of the neck as they come into land, and who call the islands More, Maan and Eer.

St. Enda, as I have told, sailed to Aran on a stone; we, when we can afford the thrill, fly in a cubby-hole of metal and plastic, and feel miracle has not died out of the world. The Saint's Boat, Bád na Naomh, a limestone block that looks like a beached currach, lies on the shore near the west end of the runway, and often the plane starts its take-off from near it. Having taxied out and turned to face into the wind it pauses there while we all make what
preparations
we can for the moment of disconnection with the earth. The pilot flicks various switches on and off, the islanders cross themselves. I make no gesture to technology or religion, but I
keep my eyes fixed on St. Enda's boat, the paradoxical
foundation-stone
of the Aran I am about to leave. Neither the Galway
businessmen
nor the dozers on the
maoilín
know what figurations of first and last things they preside over.

Beyond the last of the cottages the road makes a long slow bend around An Trá Mhór, the big strand. Halfway between Cill Éinne and the last of Aran’s villages, Iaráirne, is the graveyard, standing over the beach on a sandy bluff. In a steep hollow
perpetually
threatened by sand-slides in the middle of the graveyard is a ruined church, roofless, its gable peaks on a level with the
surrounding
tombstones. This is Teallach Éinne; the word
teallach
means a household or domestic establishment, which may be a monastic one, as here: St. Enda’s “familia.”

The church, which I shall describe in detail when I visit the rest of the monastic remains inland of Cill Éinne, is in part very early; it has the huge rough masonry, the narrow round-topped east window and other features of eighth-century work. But it is by no means as early as some allegedly historical events indirectly
associated
with St. Enda, whose own dates are not recorded. (According to the mediaeval account published in Colgan’s
Acta
Sanctorum
Hiberniae,
St. Enda was granted the island by a certain king, who, say the Four Masters, died in
AD
489.) The saint is said to be buried to the north-east of the church—this seems to be a traditional site for a founder’s grave—but his tomb is deeply covered in sand, along with no fewer than a hundred and twenty other graves “in which none but saints are buried,” if Colgan’s
Acta
Sanctorum
and Michael Hernon the minibus driver are to be believed.

In fact it is not necessary to believe that there actually was a St. Enda in order to venerate him properly; the case of the miracle worker runs parallel to that of the miracle, already discussed in
connection with stone boats. By the probable date of the earliest written references to him, monks and hermits may well have been inhabiting Aran for many lifetimes. The blown sand was perhaps already heaping up among their predecessors’ tombstones when they began to build the church here. Marram grass grew up through the sand and stabilized it; the legend of the founding
father
grew up through these strange celibate and therefore radically disjunct generations of monks, giving them a continuous identity, a “family.” The earliest burials, marked by unlettered boulders or slabs inscribed only with a cross, were reburied again and again as newer gravestones caught more sand and the indefeasible grass forced its way up through it; there was no going back to check dates or cross-examine witnesses of earlier days. As the monastery grew, adding a round tower to itself, a dormitory, a refectory, other cells and churches, giving rise to sister houses in other parts of Aran, so the retrospective glory of St. Enda grew, while perhaps the sand was already lapping at the sills of his chapel in the
graveyard
. There may even have been a calendar-custom of digging it out every year, just as today the similarly beduned chapel of St. Caomhàn in Inis Oírr is rescued from the year’s burial on the saint’s day. Similarly, St. Enda’s
Life
was being rescued from the slippage of memory, written down, copied, annotated, translated, in distant seats of learning. By the time the
Life
was printed the monastery had long been dead, for O’Flaherty’s
West
Connaught
of 1684, on what evidences is unknown, states that the last abbot of St. Enda’s flourished in 1400. Meanwhile sand continued to wrap around the old church, perhaps helping to shelter it from the turbulent centuries of Elizabeth and Cromwell that saw the utter ruination of the rest of the monastery.

The graveyard seems to have acted as an endstop for the
running
battle of the O’Briens and the O’Flahertys in the 1560s; at least, tradition has it that the slain are buried by the shore just west of it. There are no stones to fix the spot; probably the O’Brien corpses were hastily shovelled into the dunes, any
survivors
who might have marked their resting-place having fled, and
it not being in the interest of the usurpers to memorialize the
former
lords of the islands. Bones occasionally drop out of the sandy brink around the shoreline here, which is called Poll na Marbh, the bay or hollow of the dead. In 1984 a man digging a pit for a cattle-grid by the roadside opposite came across parts of skeletons. The
garda
came in haste, took one look, and put away his
notebook
saying disappointedly, “Those have been there hundreds of years!”—decay’s merciful Statute of Limitation precluding any definite assertion that these were O’Brien bones and that the name of their killers was O’Flaherty.

In the middle of this field of the fallen is a little hollow,
between
the road and the shore and about a hundred yards
north-west
of the consecrated graveyard, traditionally used as an infants’ burial ground. Limbo, that neutral domain between the bliss of Heaven and the pains of Hell, invented by theologians to
accommodate
the afterlife of those who had not had life enough either to sin or to be saved, was until a couple of generations ago thought to be the portion of the stillborn or of babes who died unbaptized. Their bodies were discreetly buried in places that seem to answer to their spiritual abode: on boundaries between townlands, under mearing walls between holdings, on the no-man’s-land of the seashore, in the ancient earthworks and ring-walls popularly
associated
with the non-Christian otherworld, or on the margins of consecrated ground.

“Strangers” washed up on the shore, of whom no one could tell if they had been believers or not, were also buried here at Poll na Marbh, a place not consecrated by the Church but not completely secular either, for any long-continued custom is to a degree
consecration
. But this uncharitable exclusion of human sea-wrack from the blessed soil of the graveyard has been gradually relaxed. Two corpses from the sinking of the
Lusitania
off Kinsale in 1915 (“E. V. Woolden and L. C. C.” is all the plaque of their little
monument
can tell of them) are buried in a secluded and peripheral
hollow
but nevertheless within the cemetery walls, while one of the
prime sites along the walk from the cemetery gates to the church is occupied by a florid high cross with an inscription in Basque to a sailor lost off a Greek ship in the last war.

Even an atheist is lurking in here somewhere, according to old gossip. Johnny Mullen, father of Pat, was considered such a social and religious heretic that it seemed doubtful if Father Killeen, the parish priest of the day, would permit his burial in God’s ground. Pat’s attitude to his Da was ambivalent; he both hated and relished the old man, the self-styled king of the island. “If we can’t bury him we’ll pickle him!” Pat is said to have said, but instead they forestalled the priest by bringing the corpse here and burying it
secretly
, replacing the sods, erecting no cross, but taking “marks” for the spot—currachmen themselves, they were in the habit of using alignments of onshore features to guide them on the sea—so that none but they would be able to find it.

Celtic crosses and upright slices of shiny black or white marble ordered from monumental masons in Galway are the graveware of twentieth-century Aran, while the nineteenth century sleeps
under
recumbent limestone slabs, ponderous, grey and very
dignified
, carved by local craftsmen. These rectangles of stone, so reminiscent of the sheets of bare rock from which they were prized with crowbars, used to be shaped, decorated and lettered out on their native crags, and only then carried to the graveyard. Many of them are four or five feet long by three across, and six or eight inches thick, and moving them was a strenuous and even a
dangerous
business, especially when a quart of
poitín
was provided to fuel the teamwork; here and there in Aran one can find finished specimens that have been dropped and broken in transport. No Araner joins with me in preferring them to the imported
novelties
, largely because of the physical effort they used to exact from the family of the deceased. It is also true that the rain smoothes away their inscriptions and their simple embellishments (usually restricted to rayed quarter-circles in the corners, rows of zigzags or lozenges along the edges, and the IHS monogram) within a
century or so; but that merely makes their noble proportions the plainer, and at the last they lie on the ground like the conclusive card of our great game, the Nought of Blanks.

Contrary to what one might expect, the Irish language does not occur in these old slabs. English, old Aran’s sole means of
intercourse
with all official powers, also did for payment of the last debt and submission to the ultimate judgement. It took the Gaelic League, emanating from Dublin towards the end of the century, to tell rural Ireland that its language could and should be written down. Kilbride, the Protestant minister, was an early member of the Aran branch of the League, and so it comes about, ironically enough, that Aran’s earliest funerary inscription in Irish is on Mrs. Kilbride’s gravestone in Cill Rónáin.

All the graves in this cemetery face east to greet the dawn of the Last Day, except that of a Father Francis O’Flaherty, who will rise facing his flock. Father Francis is said to have been Aran’s first parish priest, and he died in 1825. The O’Flaherty insignia on the foot of his box-like tomb of big slabs, just south of the church, had been long lost to sight when it was disinterred from the rising sand in the course of repairs to the tomb next door, that of his
relatives
by marriage, the Gills of Cill Rónáin. The digging and
tending
of graves is a family matter in Aran; there are no undertakers or sextons here to interpose their practised suavity between the
bereaved
and the physical future of “the remains.” And as the
graveyards
are ancient, piled and packed with generations, among which it is often difficult to make room for newcomers, there is a general familiarity with bones, coffins and tombs and their processes of collapse, which may find relief in grim jests. Pat
Mullen
again, describing a rabbit-hunt here, in his novel
Hero
Breed
:

Giraldus Cambrensis, as I have mentioned, reported of Aran that here bodies do not putrefy but are left exposed, so that one may recognize one’s grandfathers and great-grandfathers. Were it so, by now we would be pressed against Heaven by the stacks of ancestors underfoot. Instead, the island uses the weight of sand and the lightness of the breeze to compress its human detritus into this slowly rising knoll, transmuting in its depths hermits into
legend
and bailiffs into rabbits.

By chance, the only interment I have attended here was that of Tiger King, the Man of Aran of the film, so once again he will be called upon to fill the role of representative islander. He died in a London nursing home, and his coffined corpse came back to Aran on the steamer, accompanied by mourners and day-trippers. A tractor carried him to the chapel in Cill Rónáin, and after the service we all followed him around the bay in an informal
procession
of cars, traps and bicycles. It was one of the best sort of Aran days, dazzling and gusty, boisterously generous to the eyes and lungs. At the graveyard the mourners dispersed for a while,
following
various worn sandy tracks between the stones to go and pray beside their own dead. Then the Tiger’s coffin was lowered into the new grave to a few wind-scattered decades of the rosary. I admired the competence of the younger male relatives who quickly filled the grave, patted the mound into neatness with the backs of their spades, and arranged a rim of stones around it. We
shook hands with the elder bereaved, using the simple formula “
Ní
maith
liom
do
thrioblóid
,” “I’m sorry for your trouble,” to which the response was, as always, a hasty, muttered, repeated “
Tá
’fhios
a’
am
,” “I know, I know.” Many of the mourners were already hurrying to catch the departing steamer. Along the sea horizon a march-past of tall rain-showers concluded the ceremony.